The search continues

The search continues

Thursday 1 September 2005 19.02 EDT
First published on Thursday 1 September 2005 19.02 EDT

Beslan was a terrible human disaster: for the 331 people who lost their lives and for their relatives who, a year on, have been unable to come to terms with their loss. But, as mothers of some of the 186 children who died in School Number One in the North Ossetian town plan to remind Vladimir Putin today, it was also a failure of the Russian state. Every government on earth, even those careless of basic freedoms, is judged on its ability to protect the lives of its citizens. The Russian authorities manifestly did not meet their responsibilities, though direct blame for the slaughter lies with the Chechen terrorists who rigged the school gym with bombs and executed innocent hostages.

Far too many questions about the atrocity remain unanswered. Why were the hostage-takers' demands unreported? Was the carnage triggered by a botched rescue attempt, including the use of flame-throwers? Many victims were burned to death; others caught in the crossfire. How was a truck-full of masked, bearded Chechens able to drive along heavily policed roads into Ossetia? How were their arms and explosives secreted in the school? Incompetence may seem the most likely explanation. But two official inquiries have still not published their reports and no senior official has been punished. Bereaved families deserve fuller answers than they have been given, even if the price is denting Kremlin machismo. Surely lessons could be learned from Beslan, though sadly none were from previous hostage crises involving Chechen separatists - the 2002 siege of a Moscow theatre and another at a southern Russian hospital in 1995 - which each cost more than 100 lives.

Western governments have every interest in seeing an efficient, accountable and democratic Russian state - and one which does not hide behind the brutality of terrorism to avoid tackling the root causes of problems, including Chechnya itself. But the enduring image from one small and unwittingly famous little provincial town is of grieving women pressing their foreheads against pictures of their dead children, hanging in rows on the ruins of their school gym walls.